conclusions

the Rethinking Innateness and Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience notes ended up in the powerpoint presentation, and I don't feel like reproducing them here. not much point, as far as I can see.

I was just thinking of some things that I should say in the wrap-up report.

I need to emphasize more what the conclusions are from the research. something about how there are modules in the brain, clearly, but that looking for ones that are simultaneously innate and domain-specific isn't going to turn up much. the innate things in the brain seem to be lower level things that bubble up somehow to make more complex things.

I think what's wrong with the cobbled together collection of mental modules view is that it isn't a complex system. It's not hierarchical. It's just a collection of simple machines that together would look like something smart, but really would be more like a computer. I think what's interesting about the brain is that it's not like that. It's that there are complex relationships between the parts, and there's an unintuitive and mysterious recipe for how it all gets put together.

so maybe that's why the complexity part seemed to get lost a little in this project. the models I was dealing with aren't complex models, even though what they're trying to model is.

i think i shoudl also say something about how i'm not sure this was a good choice of project for me for this class. it's a topic I wanted to know more about, but in looking for what mI wanted to learn, I kept getting pulled away, either from the question mI was supposed to be answering, or from the themes of the course. Maybe the course and the topic could have worked better together, but it seemed like it wouldn't be in ways that were the sort of thing i like to do. not sure i can put my finger any more accurately on what i mean than that.

last minute

I actually have done a bunch of work since the last post. While I was in Boston, I read several chapters of a textbook called Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, by Mark Johnson that is basically a first textbook in a newly defined field. This field seems to be what I was searching for, only I didn't realize that the search would turn up anything as coherent as that. I'd found a reference to the field of Developmental Cognitive NEuroscience in the Quartz paper, and went looking for a book called Brain Development and Cognition, A Reader in the library. Next to it on the shelf was the Johnson book, and they turned out to be companion volumes, one the textbook, the other a collection of seminal papers on topics discussed in the textbook.

I read the DCN text while I was in Boston, instead of attending the conference. The only session I went to was the one I presented at. I didn't take any notes, because I was reading in crowded hotel lobbies and cafes, but I folded over the corners of some pages, so hopefully it will all come flooding back to me when I open up the book again.

I assigned readings for the talk out of another book, Rethinking Innateness, that I'd been meaning to get into for a while. Figured assigning reading from it would force me to read some. Luckily the short reading turned out to be on what I thought it would be, and does seem like a relevant sort of introduction. Now I'm going to read the longer chapter... this is going to be a looooong day. After that, I'll try to remember what mI read from the DCN text, then if there's time, I'll read one of the papers from the BDC reader. that's the plan.